hanging on the gallows, the cries of children in the burning buildings of Paris. It was the sound of the collapse of reason and sanity.
She looked down at the face of the man in her arms and now she screamed too. It was the Raven.
Aelis let the sword fall from her hands, and Leshii sprang forward to wipe away the blood where she had been pressing it into her neck beneath her chin.
‘It was the witch. You were enchanted.’
‘Yes.’
‘What is to be done? What is to be done?’ The merchant was talking as much to himself as to her.
Aelis sat back against the prow of the little boat. She was cold beyond measure.
‘Get me to a fire, Leshii.’
‘The night is falling, lady. We cannot risk the birds.’
‘The birds will not come tonight.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘She is scared, Leshii, I felt it. That woman who pursues us, she is terrified. She is acting out of fear.’
The face of the Raven seemed to hover before her. How had she not seen it? His skin was ripped and torn by the beaks of the birds; he was stronger, better fed, healthier than the confessor, but they were like brothers. It was as if they were the same man, his image reflected in some imperfect and distorting mirror.
‘It is wiser to keep moving.’
‘Let me have a fire, Leshii. I am so very cold.’
The merchant nodded and steered the boat into the bank. The mule gave a great sigh of relief and hopped ashore, and the fishermen beached their boat beside them.
‘Problem?’ said one, nodding to the bloody cloth Aelis held beneath her chin. His hair was grey and his face raw with years of wind and sun.
‘No problem,’ said Leshii. ‘The lad is an ascetic.’
‘A what?’
‘A mystic. He seeks pain to put him nearer to God. They have them in every religion; I’m sure they have them in yours — what is it, brother?’
‘We are Christians of the holy Catholic Church,’ said the fisherman.
‘As am I,’ said Leshii. ‘Come on, we’ll have a fire. The lad will join us tonight.’
‘Honoured indeed,’ said the younger fisherman, a man with the slightly surprised look of one of his catches.
They sat together in the night, cooked river trout on the fire and ate it with samphire from the waterside. Aelis was hungry and gobbled it down.
The younger man bit a piece of samphire in two and waved the remaining half towards Leshii and Aelis. ‘Getting near the sea now, as Saint Peter’s plant shows.’
‘We need to go east, brother. Will we pick up a ship there?’
‘Who knows? Tomorrow we’ll see what the Norsemen have left of the land. There’s nothing out towards the coast; all the villagers have come inland. Those bastards were beaten here in the summer but people know they’ll be back. You might find yourself on a boat to the west and north as a slave if you’re not careful. I’m not sure ships go east any more.’
The fisherman’s words stirred something in Aelis’s memory. She felt she had been a prisoner before — taken north on a ship. The memory was so vivid to her. She saw great dark mountains rising out of a cold black sea, felt the bitter north wind, smelled the greasy wool of a sea cloak, heard the creak of the rigging.
Huddling into the fire, she touched her neck. It was sore from where she had pressed in the tip of the sword. She looked at the faces of the fishermen in the firelight. They seemed like spirits of the underworld to her.
At Loches there had been a little chapel. Her uncle had commissioned a man to paint some biblical scenes for it. She had sat and watched as he mixed his pigment and egg and made the faces of the apostles appear on sheets of wood. Every day Aelis watched him, and eventually he asked her if she would like to be the model for a picture of the child saint Agnes of Rome. He had painted her outside in the clear summer light, on a panel he had used before for an unsuccessful attempt at a depiction of Saint Catherine. She’d been fascinated to watch herself appear from the mess of colours he kept in his little pots and to hear the story of how Agnes had refused to marry the prefect’s son, so the prefect had her put to death. Roman law didn’t allow him to kill a virgin, so he had her dragged naked through the streets to a brothel to be raped. But she prayed, and hair grew all over her body to cover her nakedness, and each man who tried to rape her was struck blind. A pyre was made for her, but the wood would not burn, so a soldier stabbed her through the throat.
When the picture was done Aelis had gone with the artist to the kitchen to eat and flirt with him. When they returned, a shower of rain had blown into the clear blue day, washing part of his painting away. Through the face of the child, the eyes of the woman Catherine peered out. This image had come back to her because the same thing was happening to her now. Memory, or something like memory, was becoming so powerful that the world she walked through seemed no more than an impression, a shimmering of sun on water, a shadow on fog.
And then there was that face, not the woman but the man she had held in her arms. She had looked down at him and known him — the Raven, the thing that stalked her. She had once felt close to him. But when? The wolfman had said she had lived before, which was a belief contrary to holy law but one for which Aelis had a distinct sympathy.
A preacher from the east had been put to death at Loches for saying that Sophia of God’s Left Hand was equal in divinity to Christ. She had heard him speak before he was arrested. Only one thing he had said remained in her mind: ‘And the disciples said, “Tell us clearly how they came down from the invisibilities, from the immortal to the world that dies.”’
His execution had enraged many of the servants, who said rightly that worse heresies were spoken at the table of the count. Aelis had not gone to see the hanging — she was too young and never had the stomach for that sort of thing anyway. The servants had said that he had shown no fear and declared that the world, his flesh, was only related to divine reality in the way a painting is related to the thing it represents. He no more feared to lose it than to see a child’s doll broken.
These recollections chilled Aelis. Her mind seemed like a plundered house, its contents smashed and disordered, but at the same time a new clarity was upon her. She could connect things she had never connected before and sense a truth deeper than anything she had ever known. The preacher had been right, she felt it in her heart. The world was a painting and now the pigments were being washed away. But what was underneath? The caves, that figure in her arms and those terrible symbols that fizzed and spat, shone and chimed inside her mind, and most of all the figure of the man with the wolf’s head who watched her in her dreams and whispered words of love in her ear?
Her heart beat fast and she was sweating despite the cold. She was terrified, though not of the things that stalked her nor the empty night and the strange men who surrounded her. Then of what? She tried to give it a name. Fate? Destiny? Or just time, like a weight that hampered her every movement? She felt a sense of the vast darkness before her birth, something that had been a blank to her but in which ghostly faces now seemed to loom. Everything she had known was wrong, or rather more complicated and dangerous than she had guessed.
And what of the man she had held in her arms in that vision? What of the Raven? There, by the riverbank, with the fire in front of her, the damp of the spring night cold on the back of her head, the discomforts of twigs and stones beneath her, the fishermen in front of her and the merchant nervously scanning the sky for birds, she was terrified of him. But she had had a vision, a vision that had seemed more real than the boat, the river, Leshii or his mule. She felt so strongly she was linked to that man she had seen in her arms by something that went beyond concerns of property, family or social position, the same thing that had made Judith run away with Iron Arm, the same thing the little merchant, the one who sat before her like a spirit of the fire in his turban, wide trousers and tapering beard, had wanted but never felt, the thing that the fishermen had never even contemplated, tied to the facts of net and boat, famine and plenty.
Aelis had felt it in her heart since she was a child. She was incomplete. Now she knew why she had gone wandering in the night at Loches, why her dreams were full of searching and never finding. She had been looking for him. To what purpose? So she might die? No. Then what? She had no idea, or couldn’t name it to herself. Still she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was for him she had walked barefoot by the dark River Indre at night, for him she had run through the corridors and caves of her dreams. That felt more terrible to her than anything she could
